Holistic Approach to Intrinsic Capacity Assessment: An Engineering Perspective

The growing interest in healthy ageing has fostered the definition and use of proper measures to assess decline in older adults. The World Health Organisation has defined the concept of intrinsic capacity to address this issue. In this paper, we approach the intrinsic capacity concept from an engineering perspective. Our contribution is threefold: (i) we summarise the results of a literature review on the topic, which points to a lack of holistic solutions to assess intrinsic capacity automatically, by using information technology, (ii) we suggest a data-warehouse-inspired architecture to tackle the problem, and (iii) we discuss the main challenges that remain open and must be studied in the future. Overall, this paper is a first step towards the definition of an architecture allowing the practical implementation of a holistic, context-aware, automatic system to measure intrinsic capacity and monitor the healthy ageing of elders.